Underwater robot holds promise for oil-spill clean-up operations

The remotely operated vehicle (ROV) developed by a team at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, is able to use acoustic signals to gauge the volume of a spill, and locate the thickest part of the slick, a task that is currently performed by visual surveillance from aircraft ands boats. The difficulty of assessing spill size and volume is likely to increase as oil exploration and recovery moves into Arctic waters, where ice and bad weather can hinder access and visibility.

Developed with funding from the  US government’s Oil Spill Response Research program, and tested in the program’s  2.6 million-gallon Ohmsett wave tank in Leonardo, New Jersey, the ROV  gauges the thickness of a slick by emitting sound waves from below. These waves reflect off the density boundaries between water and oil, oil and air, or oil and ice. Measuring the slight delay between the reception of these reflected echoes allows the vehicle’s software to gauge the thickness of surface and below-ice oil slicks at very fine resolution—from slicks less than 0.5 millimetres thick to more substantial accumulations of up to several centimetres.